Opera and fine dining... the notorious former gangster Terry Adams is finding life hard after crime

The boss of the feared Adams family has been ordered to pay £650,000 under the
Proceeds of Crime Act, but continues to plead poverty as his empire is
unravelled

Terry Adams with his wife, Ruth, left, outside the High Court in London

By Maxine Frith

7:15AM BST 17 Aug 2014

For a man who claims to be living on £200-a-week handouts from friends and family, Terry Adams cut a remarkably flamboyant figure when he appeared at the High Court last month. Clad in a £750 electric-blue satin suit (which he designed himself), the 59-year-old former gangster strode into the court, with his glamorous wife, Ruth, by his side.

The ever-loyal Mrs Adams maintained a stony countenance, sporting oversized sunglasses and expensively coiffed hair as she tottered past waiting reporters and photographers in her stilettos. Admittedly, this may have been one public performance that the 48-year-old part-time actress, who once appeared in EastEnders, was not exactly relishing.

The High Court hearing was to determine whether the couple are telling the truth when they claim they are living on the breadline, relying on Ruth’s meagre income from occasional bit-part roles and her menswear business – or if they are still enjoying a multimillionaire lifestyle thanks to their family’s 30-year rule as one of Britain’s most feared crime syndicates.

Last week, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies ruled that Adams had concealed his true assets and ordered him to hand over more than £650,000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Adams claims he doesn’t have the money.

Failure to comply could result in him being returned to prison, two years after he last walked free from an eight-week sentence for breaching a financial reporting order designed to recover some of the £200 million fortune his family is thought to have accumulated over the years.

In April, Adams’s younger brothers Tommy and Michael were also arrested as part of Operation Octopod, a specialist police investigation designed to target the notorious family’s assets, as well as those of other criminal clans in the UK. The brothers are waiting to find out if they will be charged.

Whether the Crown Prosecution Service ever succeeds in seeing the Adamses where it wants them – behind bars and stripped of their assets – remains to be seen.

Despite their fearsome reputation – one underworld figure once said “they make the Kray brothers look like clowns”– members of the Adams family have reputedly long evaded justice. Linked to at least 25 murders, torture, violent extortion rackets, drug dealing and the £26 million Brink’s-MAT armed robbery (which involved three tons of gold bullion), the family were known as the A-Team and the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate through the 1980s and 1990s.

Terry – who now prefers to be known as Terrence – is the eldest of 11 children born to Irish-Catholic parents in Islington, north London, in the 1950s and 1960s. He turned to crime as a teenager, starting with petty theft, then moving into extorting market stall-holders in north London with his brothers, and graduating to armed robbery.

He was seen as the brains of the family, while Tommy became the financier and Patrick – known as Patsy – developed a reputation as the violent enforcer.

Patsy now lives on the Costa del Sol in Spain and has so far avoided the latest round of arrests. Tommy has been jailed for drug dealing, and was convicted but later cleared of helping launder proceeds from the Brink’s-MAT haul. Other siblings have not been connected with the crimes of their brothers.

During their heyday, such was their influence that they were believed to have had police officers, prosecutors and lawyers on their payroll. The gang was linked to the shooting of the Krays’ notorious chief henchman, Mad Frankie Fraser. Another former A-Team associate is rumoured to be encased in concrete beneath the O2 Arena for failing to stay loyal, while a crooked financier who fell foul of the family was allegedly tortured to the point where his nose and ear were supposedly left hanging by a sliver of skin.

The Adamses’ reputation was so great that they apparently began to franchise out the family name, charging gangsters on the make for association with the clan. They are believed to have joined up with Colombian drug cartels and had corrupt Scotland Yard detectives on speed dial.

Terry and Ruth (his childhood sweetheart) paid for their daughter Skye, now 31, to go to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London. The family lived in a £2 million home in upmarket Dukes Avenue, Finchley, with rooms filled with Henry Moore prints, Meissen figurines and Picasso lithographs.

“The Adamses are probably the last of the old-school British crime families,” says Wensley Clarkson, author of a book on Britain’s gangs. “They wanted to be accepted into the Establishment. They’re a bit like the Sopranos – they made their money and then sent their children to private schools, bought art, invested in legal businesses.

“Terry, in particular, is very bright – you have to be to run a criminal enterprise like he did. In another era, another world, he could have been head of a major international corporation, and that’s how these people see themselves, in a way. I suspect that Ruth doesn’t really know – or want to know – how he made his money.”

By the beginning of the century, the brothers had accumulated enough money to go into legitimate businesses, including restaurants, nightclubs and even a failed attempt to buy Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

As home secretary back then, David Blunkett had promised new laws to recover the proceeds of crime from career criminals, and MI5 was helping to bug Terry’s homes for evidence.

Adams, of course, was one step ahead of the law – he had been tipped off about the bugs and delighted in delivering graphic pretend sound-effects of sex with his wife, as well as homilies to associates on how he was now going straight.

It took until 2007, when he was convicted of the relatively minor charge of money laundering, before he was finally behind bars, sentenced to seven years.

He was out by 2010, collected from jail in a Porsche accompanied by two burly minders. The ever-loving Ruth treated him to a “post-prison makeover” at a luxury spa, including a revolutionary stem-cell facelift, which landed him back in prison for breaching the £500-per-item limit he was supposed to be confined to as part of a Proceeds of Crime Act order.

Last month’s court hearing was told how Mrs Adams had spent thousands of pounds on cosmetic dentistry and diet plans, while her husband had paid for tickets at the Royal Opera House, European flights and dinners at top restaurants in London in recent months.

Adams claims these fripperies are down to the kindness of friends and family and that he is virtually penniless, telling the court that he has to “ponce off” his wife’s meagre earnings.

Mrs Adams is the sole shareholder and chief executive of N1 Angel, an online menswear company that employs “Terrence” as creative designer and is frequented by premiership footballers who snap up its £800 suits and frock coats. Mr and Mrs Adams have also set up a charity for the homeless called Angel Our House – it is due to launch later this year, although details are sketchy and attempts to contact it last week were fruitless.

The couple say that the house in Finchley, the works of art and the designer lifestyle are long gone; they now live in a one-bedroom apartment in London Colney, near St Albans.

Lawyers for Adams argued that the financial reporting order has stripped him of any fortune he had and prevents him from earning any money.

However, those in the know say that the wily Adams will no doubt have some form of pension – legitimate or otherwise – squirrelled away for the future.

“It’s not just the Adams family but other major syndicates that are being pursued under the Blunkett laws,” says Clarkson. “But the problem is that it is too little, too late. They [the syndicates] see these financial proceedings against them as a form of tax and, like any corporation, they will try to avoid and in some cases evade them.”

So as Adams approaches retirement age, what does the future hold? Clarkson believes that the old crime clans like the Krays and the Adamses are a thing of the past. “Those families may have been brutal,” he says, “but the current situation is far more sinister – you have the Eastern European gangs like the Albanians and Russians, who are so cold-blooded, so violent, and the police don’t even know who they are.

“The old families didn’t want their children to go into crime – they wanted something different for them. Now you have families where the new generation are even more brutal than their parents because they feel they have something to prove.”